Why You Should Make This Estonian Tech Team Your Next Career Move

Hot e-commerce solutions + cool city + awesome tech = dream job

Imagine a world where you can confidently shop for clothes online, completely safe in the knowledge that you won’t have to go through the trouble of returning it (the horror!). Imagine a world where you don’t have to burden your millennial attention span with trying to remember your jeans size (was that a UK 12 or a U.S. 12?).

Now also imagine that you can be the one building the tech making this glorious dream a reality. Or, instead of imagining it, you could just move to Tallinn and live the dream at Fits Me.

Founded in Estonia, headquartered in London, and fuelled by the scale of Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, Fits Me helps clothing brands and retailers tackle a pressing challenge: the need get to know their shoppers individually. For consumers around the globe, this means the ultimate online shopping experience — true personalization. For the Fits Me team, it means seriously exciting challenges at a company that’s scaling hard.

Fits Me is now partnering with Jobbatical to find software engineers (a passion for .NET and AngularJS is a must) to join their Estonian office. I spoke to Daisy Inslermann, their Tallinn-based recruitment specialist, about what makes this team in Estonia’s tech-obsessed capital a top choice for top talent.

A tailor-made origin story

The idea behind Fits Me was born in 2006 — the momentous year the world’s first tweet was sent and Pluto lost its planethood. Founders Heikki Haldre and Paul Pällin initially set out to create a 3D modelling option for a business focusing on affordable custom-made suits. Things escalated, and within a year, they had partnered with Estonia’s top university to build cutting-edge robot mannequins.

Spotted in the Fits Me office: the original robo-mannequins

Fast-forward to 2017: Fits Me has been acquired by Rakuten, the 4th largest e-commerce concern in the world, and is gearing up to scale like there’s no tomorrow. And their proprietary algorithm and the unprecedented wealth of data they’ve collected over the years means they’re pretty much the best in an extremely competitive business.

With Rakuten’s backing, Asia is opening up for Fits Me, and the U.S. market is next. If you don’t know about Rakuten, by the way, they’re kind of a big deal. Recently having replaced Qatar Airways as FC Barcelona’s main global sponsor, Rakuten is the biggest name in e-commerce you’ve never heard.

Ichiba, Rakuten’s massive online shopping platform, is where Fits Me’s application — Fit Origin — comes in particularly handy. “Today we have around 400,000 of their products covered,” says Daisy. “But there are millions of products. So our application needs to be integrated for millions more. It’s insane.”

A team looking for the perfect fit

With that kind of crazy scaling to look forward to, 50% of Fits Me’s human resource is invested in engineering and data science — a clear sign that they treasure their engineers. And with good reason — this is the team tasked with the responsibility of building one of the world’s hottest e-commerce solutions. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

What better place to do it than Tallinn — one of Europe’s most exciting tech and startup hubs? Pint-sized Estonia is making a name for itself as one of the most entrepreneurially minded countries around. With more startups per capita than any other European country and a digital society that’s blazing the trail for the rest of the world, this tiny Baltic nation has everything going for it.

From three-minute tax declarations to electronic voting, Estonia is small and agile enough to keep innovating the way countries are run. Daisy has nothing but praise for her home country’s forward-looking ways. “Someone in Germany once asked me to fax something,” she recalls a horrifying encounter with ghosts of ancient technologies. “I said we don’t have that here.”

Growing rapidly in this fertile startup ecosystem, Fits Me’s tech team is a creative bunch building and honing a DevOps culture where everyone is an architect and has ownership of what they’re working on. The excitement in the office is palpable — combining unbridled startup spirit with the financial security of being backed by a giant will do that to a company.

If this sounds like a team you want to be part of, check out Fits Me’s open positions and apply on Jobbatical. Or, if you want to move to Europe but didn’t spot the right fit at Fits Me, check out Jobbatical’s ranking of the top startups to work for in Estonia.